Brewmaster Monk Artifact Traits and Relics

The World of Warcraft Legion 7.2.5 Brewmaster Monk Artifact page explains what each of the Fu Zan, the Wanderer's Companion's traits do, your general build order, and what relic bonuses to look out for. This guide is written by BrewingScribe, read more at Brewing Mastery.

Active Ability

Equipping Fu Zan, the Wanderer's Companion grants you the ability Explodierendes Fässchen, which throws an explosive keg at the target location, dealing massive damage and making enemies afflicted by it miss their melee attacks for the next few seconds.

Basic Traits:

Begabter Student - You gain 1% crit chance per rank for 3 seconds whenever you dodge or heal yourself via Gabe des Ochsen. While the uptime ofthis will be fairly high as we regularly dodge due to our mastery, the crit provided is relatively small.

Sture Entschlossenheit - You automatically summon a Gabe des Ochsen when you are brought below 35% HP. This does not appear to have acooldown to the proc and as such is an extremely good trait to pick up.

Zeit klauen - Tigerklaue has a 10% chance (per rank) to deal 300% of normal damage and to reduce the remaining cooldown on yourBrews by an additional second. Rather solid trait. In fact, it's the strongest offensive single target trait we have.

Potenzierender Tritt - Increases the duration of Eisenhautgebräu by 0.5 seconds per rank. This is actually quite nice as over time, those seconds add up andallow you to spend more brew charges on purifying your stagger. This also increases the max duration cap of Eisenhautgebräu by 1.5 seconds per rank.

Gesunder Appetit - Increases your max health by 1% per rank. Rather tame, but not awful.

Die dunkle Seite des Mondes - Blackout-Schlag reduces the damage you will take from that enemy's next auto-attack by 2% per rank. While not amazingat reducing spike damage, this will be nice for reducing overall damage taken, which isn't an insignificant thing. Do note that if you are using thetalent Blackout-Combo, you will still want to prioritize saving Blackout-Schlag for comboing, rather than maximum uptime of this trait.

Überschuss - When you spawn a Gabe des Ochsen orb, it has a 5% chance per rank to be a greater orb, healing for twice as much. The proc rate onthis is relatively low, but the healing is fairly potent. You wouldn't miss too much if you saved this one for later.

Sternhagelblau - Increases the range of Fasshieb by 10 yards, bringing it up to 25 yards. Seeing as Fasshieb is our primary pulling tool, this isa good piece of utility to have.

Schnell wie der fließende Strom - When you use any of our Brews (including Stärkendes Gebräu), you gain 6% additional movement speed for 15 seconds,stacking up to 30%. Using one brew every 15 seconds is easy, so this effectively means we'll likely be able to have this up for most of, if not theentirety of an encounter, giving us very strong movement capacity.

Staffellauf - Increases the amount of damage purified by Reinigendes Gebräu by 1%. This is another decent enough trait that provides a nice benefit.Its value isn't insanely high, however.

Golden Traits:

Explodierendes Fässchen - Our active ability from our artifact. As mentioned before, it deals high AoE damage on a 1.25 minute cooldown and enemieshit will miss with their auto-attacks for 3 seconds. This is a strong ability with many varied uses.

Drachenfeuergebräu - After you use Feuerodem, you breathe fire an additional two times, dealing some damage. The damage is a bit more than a tickof Feuerodem's damage over time effect. Despite that, it is the strongest DPS increase per a single rank that we get in the basic tree.It also doubles Breath of Fire's duration to 16 seconds, allowing Heißblütig to have a 100% uptime, which is pretty decent defensive value.

Bierbart - When you use Eisenhautgebräu or Reinigendes Gebräu, you gain 10% dodge for 4.5 seconds. This is pretty good for dealing with overall damagetaken, which is a weakness of ours. It sees additional value when we need to dodge attacks that we also want to maintain Eisenhautgebräu for.

Verstärkung - After activating Stärkendes Gebräu, you gain 25% dodge for 21 seconds. This is a very strong buff to an already strong ability. The downsidesreally are just that you won't see this be too useful all the time if you need to save Stärkendes Gebräu, and it's already a powerful-enough cooldown for raiding.However, this has a very strong potential to be exceptional in Mythic+ dungeon content in combination with Flüchtiger Tanz when pulling multiple packs ofenemies. The amount of dodge you can have with this ability up alongside smart use of Elusive Dance is very high and will help mitigate a large portionof the overall damage that's coming in.

Empowered Traits:

New as of 7.2, you can now unlock five new Empowered traits once you hit 35 ranks. Once you do, you can complete a short questline to unlock these traits,as well as fourth base ranks of all the original 3/3 basic traits.

Standhaftigkeit des Verheerten Tempels - Increases damage dealt by 10%, Armor by 35%, and Stamina by 10%. This is the rough variant of a common power boost that allclasses receive. There's not too much else to say on this trait.

Gebräu der Dunkelheit - Increases Blackout-Schlag damage by 5% per rank. This is a fairly strong single-target trait and isn't something to shy away from.Being said, this is still less power than you get from Face Palm, especially when factoring in Blackout-Combo

Gebraute Abwehr - Fasshieb has a 20% chance to trigger a free Keg Smash. Currently this ability can proc off of itself, but I would expecta fix soon. Per point, this is now the strongest increase in an ability's power, beating out Dragonfire Brew. Not to mention its defensive abilities.

Einigkeit der Legionsrichter - Grants a proc to grant an increasing amount of Versatility per rank. More or less our new paragon trait, so there's not much moreto say about it than that. You unlock it after putting ranks into all other traits, including the old 1-34 traits that now have a fourth base rank.

Recommended build paths

1-34 Traits

This build is intended to generally min-max the order of your artifact traits, focusing on a balance between the best defensive traits anda bit of utility, as well as factoring in the increasing Artifact Power costs as you progress Fu Zan. Please do note that this is build is intendedfor raiding content. An alternate path would be to go for Sternhagelblau first before heading towards Bierbart, if you really want thatextra utility. If you are planning on doing Mythic+ content I would actually strongly advise getting Pass 3 before Pass 2 because of theaforementioned strength of Verstärkung. Because of the speed of gaining Artifact Knowledge, you realistically don't need to worryabout build order the moment you hit 110, especially when you are playing on an alt.

36+ Traits

Unlike the 1-34 trait build priority, I've created two separate builds, one which focuses on defense, another which focuses largely on offense.Both somewhat blend each other based on the desire for both, but are largely different builds. Feel free to pick one or the other to build fordepending on what you need as a player, or even combine the two!

Because of the value of the two last Empowered traits (ignoring Legionfall) for defense, this build goes for them first. While Zeit klauenisn't that strong defensively, it's still our strongest offensive trait, so I recommend picking it up over some of the other defensive traits.

In regards to an offensive build, get to Gebraute Abwehr first, then grabbing Zeit klauen. Note that the passes after this are somewhat fluid.Grab whatever you feel is most opportune for the moment; the earlier passes can be steamrolled through fairly quickly with sufficient ArtifactKnowledge and the later passes are generally not worth sweating about.

Relics

Depending on what you want, you should go for relics which give ranks in Heißblütig or Potenzierender Tritt for defense and Zeit klauen for offense.Because of how powerful trait effects are compared to weapon item level for us, once you hit 110 its better to focus on finding these traits rather than upgrade item level.

At first, you will only be able to put two kinds of relics into Fu Zan, a Life relic and a Storm relic. However, once you complete the Monk Class Hall campaign you will unlock your third relic slot, which is for Iron relics. For more information, check out Wowhead's Class Hall Campaigns guide.Back to TopOct 24, 2016 - Updated for 7.1Mar 26, 2017 - Updated for 7.2June 12, 2017 - Updated for 7.2.5